The pond appreciates that some studious and diligent herpetology students are inclined to be completists - how else to discover the lizard Oz is getting weirder by the day? - so it behoves the pond to note what it missed from Our Heroic Homeric Henry last week, when the brave lad abandoned his Zionist duties to frolic with the perfidious French ...
No stranger to street rebellions, this time the republic is facing an existential problem with no obvious solution.
Did the pond say he abandoned his Zionist duties?
Of course not ...
As they ransacked luxury stores, jubilant looters cried “Bismillah” –“In the name of Allah” – over spoils ranging from handbags to electric scooters, now being sold on eBay.
And the wider challenge to republican authority is stark: in a survey published last November, 57 per cent of French Muslims aged 15 to 24 said that respecting Islam mattered more than respecting the laws of the republic.
And so on and so forth, and in much the same spirit, the "we wuz robbed" spirit inspired by mad King Donald has been taken up by Flávio Bolsonaro, and by Benji, with great enthusiasm ...
Eisenkot Says Netanyahu Leading Influence Campaign to Undermine Election Results
The party said right-wing figures are making "vile lies and baseless" accusations that demonstrate their fear of the Arab community. "This is a coordinated campaign, funded by Likud figures, that began many months ago and is aimed at undermining the election results and their legitimacy," the party said in a statement Thursday.
The Joint List further called on opposition leaders to "stop cooperating with Netanyahu's vile lies and the racist Kahanists, to stop being puppets on Netanyahu's strings, and to stop advancing his campaign of incitement."
It's only free and fair if you win, and it's always second class citizens in an apartheid state, with no one daring to form an alliance with the "untouchables".
But the pond made the mistake of looking back, when huzzah, Our Heroic Heraclitean Henry was back this Friday and in top ancient Greek form ...
ALP’s moral weakness breaks our civic bonds
8 mins
The caption for the high art: The School of Athens by Raphael shows Plato and Aristotle (centre) in discussion. (Here)
Cry out to the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google.
The pond has tried to steer clear of the Haines tragedy - on the Polonial principle of avoiding politicising and making judgements until the facts are known, even if Polonius and his reptile companions only establish such principles in order to evade them.
But the pond couldn't help noticing this ...
Alleged Helen Haines attacker Brendan Nugent was likely in psychosis, prison report says
The ABC can reveal an initial evaluation of Brendan Nugent, taken in the days after he was arrested, said he held delusions of being persecuted and was most likely in a state of psychosis...
...A source with knowledge of Mr Nugent's assessment said it also indicated he had a "significant mental health disorder". It is understood schizophrenia is currently being considered as one of the possible diagnoses.
"So far nothing is indicating extremism," the source said.
"There's no group, no ideology, no intention."
They said that "conspiratorial" social media posts unearthed in the days after the alleged attack — referring to Israel, Gaza, climate change, the Kremlin and notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein — were more likely a symptom of paranoia and his mental health deteriorating.
"Persecutory beliefs are the most common kind of delusion, and they often latch onto whatever in the news. So you see Ukraine and the CIA turning up alongside fears about his own safety."
The source said the assessment did not rule out that Mr Nugent had a grievance.
"She'd been a friend of his family for more than 20 years, and she was his local member. That's not a random choice. When paranoia takes hold, it usually pulls in the people around you."
Mr Nugent has been withdrawing from alcohol and cannabis since being in custody.
Bear that in mind when reading this patented, prize piffle and tosh ...
Plato gave it an unforgettable image: sailors who cast aside the pilot, seize the helm, throw their rivals overboard and fall upon the stores, threatening their own survival.
So, too, stasis wrecked civil governance, opening the way to ruin, foreign subjugation and the extinction of freedom.
The attack on Helen Haines brings that ancient fear into Australia’s present. Coming after three years of unprecedented antisemitic vitriol and violence, it forces us to confront the erosion of what the Greeks called civic friendship: the bond that made a shared political life possible despite searing disagreements.
It was that bond the self-governing cities of Renaissance Italy sought above all to preserve.
Machiavelli called it the “vivere civile” (living civilly): a fellow-feeling that fell short of friendship but imposed an obligation to settle disputes through the laws. It rested on civility, understood not as mere etiquette but as a branch of morality.
Just to affirm Our Henry's devotion to classical references, as a way of attempting to sanitise his thinly disguised bigotry, the reptiles flung in a visual confirmation of his "dictionary of quotations" ways ...A statue of Machiavelli near Florence.
More flowery references flowed from the quill ...
Propagated through the new medium of printing, civility’s moral code proved essential to England’s recovery from its blood-soaked civil wars. By forbidding “hatred, contempt, insult and arrogance,” wrote Hobbes, it could sustain a “constant civil amity”. And while the laws, Edmond Burke observed, “touch us but here and there, now and then”, the norms of civility work by “a constant, steady, insensible operation, like the air we breathe in”, making self-restraint a habit.
Nowhere did that habit take deeper root than here in Australia. An isolated society thrown together from convicts and gentry, soldiers and squatters, was obsessed with mutual respect: not everyone could eat with aristocratic elegance, writes historian Penny Russell, “but most understood, only too well, when they were being insulted”.
What the colonists rejected was undue deference, not courtesy. Australia, John Hirst argued, was culturally democratic long before it was politically democratic: the respect for ordinary people that others had to fight for was secured in a “democracy of manners” whose essence was not to obliterate difference but to overlook it.
However, a parliament cannot overlook difference; its business is to peacefully channel and resolve it. That is why the colonial legislatures immediately and enthusiastically adopted the rules of the House of Commons Thomas Erskine May had codified in 1844. Address the chair, not your opponent; attack the argument, not the man; avoid and withdraw offensive words: together, historian Judith Brett showed, those rules allowed the sharpest disagreement without enmity, so that the weapons of debate, as May put it, were “wielded according to the laws of a more civilised warfare”.
Nor did those rules stop at parliament’s doors. The union branch, the debating club and the hospital auxiliary all ran on simplified versions of Westminster procedure. “The smallest and the greatest meetings of the land,” Brett wrote, “were linked by their shared deliberative procedures.” Universal too was the expectation that those who sat in parliament would behave at least as well as those who ran the local fete.
But that expectation rested on a habit, and from the late 1960s a generation set out to unlearn it. Self-restraint was recast as repression, to be renounced in favour of authenticity, expressive freedom and jouissance; politics became the onstage performance of behaviours once confined backstage.
From performance, it was a short step to violence. “The great lesson of May ’68,” a French Maoist declared in 1970, “is that violence pays.” And “fascism” was transformed from naming a movement into an all-purpose licence: if your opponent was a fascist, civility was appeasement and violence a duty.
Did Our Henry just attempt to absolve and disappear "fascism" from the discussion? Rioting students block Lussac Street in Paris in May 1968.
The lesson that the pond took from that is that cavorting in the streets has been an intrinsic part of French life since the great days of the late 18th century.
Was it wrong to also remember Herr Adolf in this context? If your opponent was a Communist, a socialist, or just a Jew trying to get by in the Weimar republic, civility was appeasement and violence a duty.
Could this wretched Henry be any more offensive? Never underestimate his seemingly infinite capacity for bigotry, fear and loathing ...
Long confined to the ultra-left, that cult of violence has found new carriers in the “progressive” left’s alliance with the Islamists. Within hours of October 7, 2023, Jews were being taunted on the steps of the Opera House; last October, while keffiyeh-clad protesters pelted Melbourne’s police with bottles filled with shards of glass, Hamas’s flag was cheered as the Australian flag was burnt. The blood was scarcely dry at Bondi before a taxpayer-funded artist refused to “mourn fascists”, placing a murdered Jewish child beyond the reach of civic compassion.
At last there came what all have yearned for ... a return to Thucydides ...
Hatred thus acquired the mantle of virtue and the refusal of civility became a badge of righteousness. That inversion recalls what made stasis so terrifying in Thucydides’s account: the corruption of the language in which citizens judged one another’s deeds. People “altered, at their pleasure, the customary significance of words to suit their deeds”, reducing speech to barbarous nonsense.
What has any of this got to do with Haines, though that's what set Our Henry off?
Not much. We're now well into standard litany mode ...
The restraint being unlearnt on social media does not stay there; and our governments and public institutions have done nothing to stand in the vitriol’s way. In July 1846, when a mob stormed a Melbourne hotel flying Orange banners and shots were fired, the Legislative Council immediately banned processions inciting religious and political divisions. If people “are to be allowed to annoy and insult others because they differ in opinion”, a Melbourne newspaper asked, “where is peace and order?”.
That question was still being asked, and properly answered, more than a century later. Faced with violence on our campuses in the late 1960s, vice-chancellors did not merely name and expel the offenders; they were charged and convicted, and those who reoffended were jailed.
Today, the world’s highest-paid vice-chancellors have allowed threats, harassment and intimidation to persist for months on end, rarely chastising offenders they did not dare name, much less credibly punish. Meanwhile, as violent antisemitism escalated, Labor offered pious hand-wringing instead of leadership, treating each outrage as an aberration and each warning as an over-reaction.
Yet the warnings could not be starker. The Director-General of Security now ranks political violence alongside espionage among ASIO’s gravest concerns, and has felt compelled to plead for civility.
Again the pond felt compelled to wonder.
Precisely how did all that portentous pomposity relate to the Haines tragedy, and a man reportedly in the grip of psychosis?
Apparently if you throw in Plato and Machiavelli, the offensive circle of patented bullshit is compleat...
The laws cannot transform a fractured society into heaven. They can prevent wreckers transforming it into hell. Unless our government shows the courage to confront them, it will not be the Greeks’ fear that awaits us; it will be their fate.
Every so often the pond thinks it should go into therapy as a way of understanding why it's so addicted to this completely addled inability to understand any discernible form of reality ... but perhaps it's best (certainly cheaper) to exorcise it by way of a blog post ...
But there's clearly a market for this sort of swill, with the hive mind of the lizard Oz a living, breathing, seething sea of hostility. See a sample of Our Henry's comments ...
Dear sweet long absent lord, cleanse the palate with a couple of Golding 'toons ...
And so to other notes on the jihads and early this morning the Australian Daily Zionist News was in full swing ...
‘Pervasive progressive hate’, antisemitism envoy’s new blueprint
‘Most pervasive’: Jillian Segal calls for sweeping crackdown on progressive antisemitism across institutions
Special envoy Jillian Segal has sharpened her aim on antisemitism to target its ‘modern, progressive’ element in an updated report covering universities, health, media and the arts.
By Lucy Carroll and James Dowling
Maybe ending the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank might help? Or even just accept into the system the Arab parties that played the election game? You know, instead of a full blown theocracy ...
Segal’s strategy to combat hate
Antisemitic hate crime victims to receive court anonymity under proposed legal overhaul
Special envoy Jillian Segal’s newest report suggests new education for police and judges after a contentious judgement took aim at her preferred definition for antisemitism.
By James Dowling
And the other jihad bubbled along nicely, thanks to the cranny Crantson ...
Demands grow for audit of Albanese and Chalmers spending
The PM refused to commit to net savings in the upcoming mid-year budget update, despite spending reaching a 40-year high outside Covid.
By Matthew Cranston
The totally unbiased sources making the call from inside the house?
Inter alia ...
Robert Fisher, a head of state departments such as welfare under both Labor and Liberal governments, said he would back a version of the 2014 federal commission of audit, of which he was a commissioner.
Tony Shepherd, who chaired the Abbott government’s National Commission of Audit, agreed another audit was required.
Peter Crone, chief executive of the last audit’s secretariat, said there was no doubt Australia’s current economic situation and levels of government spending meant an audit was now required.
The lizard Oz editorialist, perhaps peeved that nobody could be bothered diving beneath the fold to read their rants, turned up over on the extreme far right to back the jihad ... and early in the morning it was top of the digital world ma ...
Economic critics from all sides, but are you listening Mr Albanese?
In slamming ‘partisan’ critics of Labor spending, the PM is trying to deflect attention from homegrown inflationary pressure.
By OUR EDITORIAL WRITERS
That's more than enough of that. As usual, the immortal Rowe did it better ...
Besides, what the pond was really yearning for was a strident defence of the wealthy, the filthy rich, the tech bros struggling to get by on their last few billion, though still with enough billions to try to buy an American election.
Who better to pander to theirs and the pond's needs than Killer Creighton of the IPA?
Politics of envy driving wealth tax campaign
5 min
Let's hear it for the mighty G: Google co-founders Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page at their company headquarters in Mountain View, California, in 2004.
Say it again for the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google.
Killer was on an anti-tax crusade worthy of the IPA:
Yet today, state and federal governments combined extract taxes well in excess of 35 per cent of GDP, and their combined spending is brushing up against 40 per cent, according to the IMF Fiscal Monitor.
So it’s disappointing to hear that familiar if obnoxious clarion call to increase the GST – as if rejigging the tax base is our biggest problem amid the biggest increase in spending since the Whitlam era.
Peter Costello, who introduced the tax in 2000, is right to warn against lifting the rate beyond 10 per cent. Consumption taxes are a stealth tax, making them easy to gradually increase. Lift an income tax rate and workers’ take-home pay very noticeably falls. Lift a GST to 11 per cent and people barely notice. The Rudd government in 2008 even made it illegal to show prices exclusive of GST.
Cue a snap of Keynes ... British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Killer was heartbroken at the sight of billionaires on the run, refugees suffering from rampant persecution ...
The misguided clamour for more tax amid a global spending crisis has taken an even more ridiculous form in California, where voters next week face a ballot that would impose a 5 per cent, supposedly one-time, excise tax on the state’s billionaires. Economist Thomas Piketty, the eminence grise of the global wealth tax movement, prefers wealth taxes up to 90 per cent annually.
Polls point to a knife-edge result for what’s known as Proposition 40, less than a week out from US midterms that might see the Republicans lose control of both houses of congress, laying the groundwork for similar mad-hatter proposals at the federal level.
The mere whiff of a Californian wealth tax has already slashed the $US100bn ($142bn) projected revenue to $US30bn, according to new research by Stanford University economists Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh. Seven billionaires, including PayPal’s Peter Theil and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have decamped to other states, taking almost $US540bn, or nearly 30 per cent of the alleged tax base, with them. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who would face a $US11bn charge under the possible regime, has told the SEC he is considering joining them.
California’s billionaires already contribute between $US3.3bn and $US5.8bn in state income taxes alone, and the perpetual loss of some of that revenue would leave the state’s total tax take almost $US39bn lower, Jaros and Rauh estimated in their October National Bureau of Economic Research paper. “Billionaire departures, and the fact that new founders would think twice about locating to California, have significant potential economic effects if the location of jobs and innovation shifts elsewhere,” they added.
That the already disastrous proposal has been pushed by fellow Frenchmen and Piketty acolytes Gabriel Saez and Gabriel Zucman is bizarre, given their native France’s own failed history of wealth taxation.
The chronically underperforming debt-riddled economy has been hobbled by a wealth tax since the 1980s – another, if less “successful”, French tax innovation. By 2008 it had driven €200bn ($316bn) in wealth out of the country and was costing the French government twice what it raised in other forgone revenues, according to a well-known study by Eric Pichet. “In an open world, the (French) wealth tax impoverishes France, shifting the tax burden from wealthy taxpayers leaving the country on to other taxpayers,” he concluded. And the world is even more “open” than it was then.
Even if wealth taxes didn’t drive the wealthy away, they wouldn’t solve the public spending crisis – there’s simply not enough rich people to prop up the fiscal largesse. Last year the left-wing Australia Institute advocated a 2 per cent annual wealth tax on Australians with more than $5m in assets excluding super and their primary home, suggesting it would raise (laughably) $41bn a year, about half as much as the GST.
At this point the pond became seriously alarmed, not so much by Killer's devotion to the interests of the wealthy, but at the sight of Petey boy ... Former treasurer Peter Costello has warned against raising the GST rate. Picture: John Feder
That chin, talk about a picture of a kind of Dorian Gray - couldn't the reptiles have found a kinder snap?
Never mind, Killer's karing for the kavorting billionaires was a remarkably short outing, as he made a final plea for understanding and sympathy ...
“Even if the annual wealth tax was restricted to the 200 households on the (AFR) rich list, it would raise around $12.5bn per year from their $625bn wealth,” the Institute’s economists naively estimated, by incredibly multiplying 0.02 by their total wealth.
If the government truly wanted to raise more revenue it would slash spending to get inflation and ever-rising interest rates under control. A major recession will clobber revenues, whatever tax rates and bases are set.
Wealth tax advocates should read some more of their favourite economist Keynes, not only on the maximum taxation countries could bear, but also on the wisdom of wealth taxes themselves.
In the late 1920s he referred to them as a “new and disturbing form of taxation” that might only be used to lower income tax rates on ordinary people. Such a rational argument appears lost on today’s wealth tax zealots, who appear to be motivated by envy as much as anything else.
How refreshing. Usually the "zealots" in lizard Oz parlance are climate change zealots in the grip of a religious cult. Now it seems that they're also "wealth tax zealots".
So much zealotry, so much zealous projection.
Please, let the rich run wild and free, and should you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of one, remember to tug your forelock, and do a Uriah Heep and announce that you're "ever so very 'umble" and that Killer sent you to lick their boots and kick your last bit of change into their bulging purse... lest you appear a zealot...
Once again the hive mind was Killer's kaptive krowd ...
Now just for the balance ...
Say no more, the rest can be found via the link, though it ends in a paywall, at which point Abbie Hoffman types might head off to the intermittent archive.
The pond can't always be serious. Paul Krugman often ends his posts with a musical link, and dammit, if Krugman can do it, so can the pond, though perhaps the music might not be to Krugman's taste, and certainly done without a Nobel prize as proof of taste (though Killer lacks that credential too) ...
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